ensure true

It's almost but not quite in the article. And you don't necessarily always want this. It depends if you want else-cmds to run only when condition fails, or when either condition or then-cmds fails.

You could write the word true instead of :, coincidentally showing that : never really was a no-op in the first place. It's so not-no-op that there is even an entire external executable /bin/true to do the same job.

    condition && {
        then-cmds   # might exit > 0
        :           # ensure this block ends true
    } || {
        else-cmds
    }